Tag: Nikola Tesla

On Edison’s Birthday, Light an AC Current for Nikola Tesla

~ Chris Cocca ~ 9 Comments

Google, you disappoint me.  Your whimsical doodle today is in honor of the 164th birthday of one Thomas Alva Edison.  Industrial Prometheus, titan of invention, bringer of lux et veritas et cetera.  Too bad he was a total jackwagon.

This guy.

Don’t let anyone fool you.  For the love of money and power, Edison played a strong hand in the destruction of the most brilliant human being to ever walk the earth. Nikola Tesla‘s face should be on money. It should have been renamed the Tesla Prize.  Think Leonardo Da Vinci with alternating current, electromagnetic breakthroughs, contributions to ballistics, robotics, nuclear physics.  Think the wireless transmission of energy to electric devices by 1893.  Think of where we’d be with that now.  Think remote controlled submarines in 1898.  Think of using the Earth itself as a conductor of free energy.  Think of every cool steam-punk thing you ever saw or read.  Imagine having landed on the moon in 1920 instead of 1969.

Thomas Edison.  Happy Birthday, jerk.

Wherein I Attempt to Answer Questions My Readers Asked Google Yesterday

~ Chris Cocca ~ 2 Comments
Things I know about.

I’m pleased as punch about the first search term.  I love Kris Kristofferson, and I not just because I covet his name for my own nom de plume.  I’m going to have to go with Chris St. Christopher when I start writing hard-boiled crime novels.

The second search term is here because of my quote from this week’s “The Office,” and I’d like to try to answer it if I could.  Mark Zuckerberg’s jet pack is the same place yours is: the government-confiscated files of this guy.  That’s the only possible explanation for why this world hasn’t happened yet.  I’m pretty sure I have a post somewhere in archives here simply titled “Where is My Jet Pack? Where Is My Flying Car?” (Letting the days go by, let the water hold me down.)  Blame Thomas Edison and his smear campaign against Alternating Current. Blame whoever is holding on to those designs for the ion-repulsion flight apparatus. We should have jet packs by now.  We should have flying cars.  Mssrs. Hanna, Barbera, Disney, and Verne: you promised.